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Recently the 17th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2009) was held at the HSE. As part of this event, mathematicians, programmers, linguists and philosophers discussed principles and methods of concept representation and processing. We talked to the conference organizers and some participants about the cumulative effect of interdisciplinary research, potential for graphic representation of knowledge and some architectural surprises of the Russian capital!
Sergey Kuznetsov, the HSE's Head of Department for Applied Mathematics and Informatics, the Conference chair:
- We did our best to arrange an excellent scientific and cultural programme. For me it was the first time as a conference organizer. Of course we met a few bureaucratic obstacles, but in the end we overcame these and succeeded. Concerning the scientific results of the conference, I can say that the cumulative effect of the discussions of researchers from different but related areas is great. In addition, I am very satisfied with work of the students of our department. I must mention the workshop on algorithms comparison, organized by a second-year student of the Department for Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Fedor Strok. And in general, according to the feedback we received, the participants were very pleased.
Rudolf Wille, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany:
- Without any doubt, this conference will greatly influence my research. All of us participants of the conference, mathematicians, linguists, philosophers, - are united in the opinion that human thinking starts from conceptual thinking. That's why we focus on the issues of knowledge conceptualization, and this was the main focus of this recent conference.
Marie-Laure Mugnier, LIRMM Laboratory, France:
- The topics of the reports presented at the conference ranged from purely mathematical issues to problems concerning natural language and linguistics, programming and the creation of artificial intelligence. For example, theoretical grounds of new algorithms of computer thinking and their special computer applications were presented. I was especially interested in reports on the semantic web and on the translation of computer-gained information into natural languages. Acquaintance with Moscow was full of surprises:in the centre you could see very old buildings next to churches with golden domes, art nouveau buildings, soviet era houses and modern architecture - so, you constantly feel movement. This city is always in motion, though its destination is yet unclear.
Mark Greeves, Director for Knowledge Systems, Volcano Corporation, the USA:
- This year's conference was undoubtedly successful - brilliant researchers were brought together. As for the contents, interesting algorithms for formal concept analysis were presented, which I hadn't met before. This conference was trying to go beyond the community of computer sciences, to areas of linguistics and philosophy. This intention is revolutionary enough, and I'm sure will lead to progress. One of the topics that was constantly discussed at the conference and that might be of interest for amateurs, is the graphic representation of knowledge. Graphic representations are far simpler in use than symbolic languages. I hope that it will be possible to transfer their attributes to the field of the semantic web, part of the Internet global network. Mathematicians as well as ordinary users will benefit from that.
Fedor Strok, second-year student of the HSE Department for Applied Mathematics and Informatics, leader of a scientific workshop at the conference:
- I was a first-year student when I first had the idea to organize a workshop on algorithm productivity comparison. Comparisons of such algorithms haven't been conducted for a long time. I thought it would be possible to independently program and compare results of different algorithm applications. When we found out that the ICCS 2009 would take place in Moscow, we decided to "link"our first attempt of such a workshop to this conference. The Department tutors helped me to create an automatic system of results representation, which showed the result immediately after a specific algorithm had been input. The workshop consisted of two sessions:at the first session we presented our results, and at the second we discussed the algorithms. The workshop turned out to be very productive. For example, two participants realized almost the same algorithm with variations. After our discussion, literally within three days, one of them had improved the algorithm productivity by 1,5!
Website of the ConferenceMarina Ivanova, HSE Web News Service